The Life Everlasting

I have always favored that last stanza of the Apostle's Creed.

I believe in the Holy Spirit,

the holy catholic church,

the communion of saints,

the forgiveness of sins,

the resurrection of the body,

and the life everlasting. 

Amen.

It is the rhythm and cadence of those particular words as they fall out of our mouths on a Sunday morning that I love so well. But it is more than that, too. These are the tangible outpourings of our Christian faith. These are the experiences of the saints. These are what we know and what we do. The descriptions of God and of Jesus are of great importance for our belief. And this last stanza is how our beliefs are enacted.

I recently had a prolonged experience that I have found it difficult to speak of. Not because it is emotionally triggering or too painful to talk about. I simply haven't had an accurate vocabulary with which to express myself.

This summer I committed to undergoing a series of sessions of EMDR therapy with my counselor. EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. (Click here for a brief summary of EMDR.) It is a method of therapy designed to help people suffering from traumatic experiences to find relief by helping the body recognize that the trauma is over and thus, moving the stored location of the memory within the brain.

My counselor, who had a knowledge of my history, began by doing two different assessments of my current emotional state and behavior. Then she asked me what had made me anxious or angry or sad in the past week. We would work backwards. Working together, we would find the root lie of my emotions. For instance, when insurance denied me a CT scan for my abdominal pain, I felt alone in my health concerns, like they were all up to me to figure out. Then she would ask me another time in my life where I felt alone and where everything was up to me. I listed about a dozen. (These were not always memories that I would classify as traumatic, though at times they were. The memories ranged from my experiences of neglect and emotional abuse at the hands of addicted parents to feeling slighted by a brusque remark from a kindergarten teacher.)

We always started with the earliest memory. I would put on headphones and hold small vibrating sensors in my hands and a tone would come out of the headphones, left-to-right, as the sensors vibrated at the same speed. I would focus on the lie that I believed and every minute or so, my counselor would check in and ask me for anything I noticed or if I felt any sensations in my body. We did this through the memory until my body felt peaceful and relaxed. This signaled to her that the memory had passed--it had moved from the part of my brain where trauma is processed, and now had a time stamp put on it, telling my brain and body that it was in my past. It was not currently happening.

Then we would work on inserting the truth--what I wanted to believe instead of the lie. In this example: I am not alone. I can ask for help. I would rate how true that felt. If it didn't feel 100% true, the headphones went back on and I focused on the truth. At the very end, I would do a body scan and see if I felt any pain. The back of my head, my shoulders, my right hip. I would breathe into the parts of my body that had stored the memory, until the pain subsided.

Prior to my experience, when all I had was second-hand information and a website with a description, EMDR felt very nebulous. What was this? Was it hypnotism? What was exactly happening? How did you know if you were doing it right?

Describing it now feels nebulous, still. What happened? The transference of memories, yes. But how? And how did we know? Could I simply trust my still body and my relaxed heart rate to give me true signals? Could I know that the memory had indeed passed?


The entire experience has been hard to quantify. To describe the experience itself, as it takes place inside my body, on a couch, in a therapy room that smells like sandalwood, feels inadequate. The process doesn't feel world-changing or ground-breaking and, in fact, even as the recipient, sometimes I felt oblivious of what precisely was taking place in my brain.

But the effects. My medium-grade hum of constant anxiety has disappeared. I have not had any anxiety attacks since we finished. I have noticed my reactions have changed.  For instance, when the kids got into a fight and everyone was talking, I yelled at them, but I caught myself. I didn't feel the need to yell. My heart wasn't racing. I didn't feel out of control or desperate. I didn't feel much of anything. It had been muscle memory that made me react with yelling. So I quieted down. My outside could match my inside.

EMDR has had a profound impact on me that I find difficult to speak about. To bring it up in conversation requires much explanation of the highly specific process. Following that, the results sound comparatively hazy. Talk therapy re-framed my memories in positive terms that I could mentally process and regurgitate. Having the experience take place in my body has yielded exponentially more progress in terms of emotional regulation, but it has not given me a vocabulary in which I can offer my unformed results.

Some results surely remain yet to be seen. At the rate of processing several memories over the course of several sessions, EMDR has probably healed much of the pain of my adolescence. Even pain that is not felt on an everyday level.

Though nebulous and hazy, EMDR has been the most real, enacted, tangible means of healing in my recent life. Yet I have felt uncertain when bringing it up in Christian circles. Like anything having to do with the body or the mind, would it be seen as strange or even wrong? Something of which to be wary?

I am forever grateful that God has chosen to reveal himself to us by physical means. By a summer rainstorm, a small seed that grows into a towering sunflower, a warm hug after a hard day, a meal prepared by the hands of someone who loves us, and most acutely in the personhood of Jesus. Is it any wonder that healing takes place in our bodies? The place where we experience harm, fear, and suffering must also be the place where we know comfort, strength, and hope. The truth I tried to tell myself over and over again was falling on deaf ears. Ears that still heard the cries of a small child who felt alone.

I have been able to experience the forgiveness of sins, mine and other's, in the communion of saints. The Holy Spirit is present in therapy rooms and gardens and dinner tables and churches, alike, offering us resurrection and the life everlasting.
Amen.